We’re gonna clean up!

Cleaning up the place is hard sometimes–that’s why they call it housework–but it’s not actually impossible. All it takes is a visit from family on short notice or some other fraught occasion. Think Darth Vader, “Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them.” And it suddenly turns out that picking up, taking out the trash, washing the sink full of dishes and doing the vacuuming is actually perfectly within one’s scope–“We shall redouble our efforts, Lord Vader!”

But cleaning up the office is another matter. For three months the note had been on my calendar–Mountain Lake PBS taping–and every time I noticed I thought, hmm, better spiff the place up a little. But there never seemed to be a moment in any workday where there wasn’t something more important to spiff up in the digital world. My, that home page looks spic-and-span!

And so the heaps of paper grow and the coffee rings overlap like spirograph designs on the desk. There are still boxes of floppy diskettes and zip disks and minidisks, unlabeled and unknowable now with current technology. Long-outdated reports and memos and trade journals, manuals for software a decade out of date. There’s a turntable under the wing desk. There’s a one-Euro coin I don’t remember acquiring, right next to a tiny brass bodhisattva and a six-armed three-eyed Gumby alien that I tried to give to away unsuccessfully.

Junk mostly, but then there’s great art on the floor that should be on the wall, and lots of cables and connectors that are probably vital to something–who knows what? The art deco rocket ship pen set has to stay, and the Star Trek lunch pail. The Tibetan prayer flags that keep the world from ending–you know–important stuff. The box stuffed with 112 plastic grocery bags is probably surplus to requirements, though.

It’s all hypothetical anyhow. The camera crew has come and gone. They made sure to do close-up shots of the screen, the mouse, my hands on the keyboard pretending I could type with more than four fingers. My time in the finished ad will probably total 1.5 seconds anyway. Someday I’ll clean up the joint. In the meantime I can always boost my morale by visiting Radio Bob’s office. Now there’s a freaking nightmare.

Tags: listeningpost